Ashley Judd

Born: April 1968
Where: Los Angeles, California, USA

Described by her own mother as an intellectual pinup, Ashley Judd still remains reserve team in the Hollywood A-list.

A bookish child, she was goaded by her elder sister into acting and made contacts in the industry while working at Hollywood's Ivy restaurant.

She auditioned for the role of Christian Slater's girlfriend in the comedy Kuffs but as she has since confessed: she "thought they were boiling it down to a booby factor - choosing a pair of breasts."

Her agent suggested she pass and accept instead the smaller role of a woman in a paint store and her career began to take shape.

After her award-winning turn in Ruby In Paradise, Judd was cast as the sole survivor of a massacre who describes the traumatic event in detail in Natural Born Killers (1994).

Because her emoting was accompanied by graphic flashbacks, US censors requested that director Oliver Stone cut the scene, deeming it too violent and disturbing.

In her first Hollywood lead, Judd was cast as a capable doctor who, having escaped from a kidnapper, agrees to help the police track down the criminal in Kiss the Girls in 1997.

Roles followed in Eye of the Beholder before she landed the lead in Bruce Beresford thriller Double Jeopardy.

She featured in light drama Where The Heart Is and courtroom potboiler High Crimes with Kiss The Girls co-star Morgan Freeman.

In 2001, Judd starred opposite Hugh Jackman as a betrayed woman who becomes obsessed with studying male behavior in the romantic-comedy feature Someone Like You.

A partial return to form in the middlebrow thriller High Crimes as a high powered laywer stunned by her husband's shocking past did little to advance her craft.

However, she did provide some fire and flavour to her softer follow-up, the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.

She was then cast as in a small but crucial supporting role as Tina Modotti in the story based on the life of Frida Kahlo, Frida as a favour to longtime friend Salma Hayek.

Next came the woefully underpowered psychological thriller Twisted alongside Andy Garcia and Samuel L Jackson.

After a stint on Broadway and a never-realized flirtation with the role of Catwoman (later played by Halle Berry), Judd returned to the big screen in 2004 opposite Cole Porter (Kevin Kline) De-Lovely.